Hey all, I’m back with a pretty different game to review from my usual fare this time around. It’s my Feudal Baron: King’s Land review.
Now, Feudal Baron: King’s Land has been on the Steam platform for the PC for a couple years. Over there, it competed with a lot of other similar building titles, including ones that generally earned higher reviews in our GiN evaluations like the classic town builder Banished, or the more recent Farthest Frontier. Players on the Steam platform have a lot to choose from when it comes to builders.
However, Feudal Baron: King’s Land recently made the jump to consoles like the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5 (where it was reviewed). Builders are far less common on consoles, perhaps because the lack of a keyboard and mouse tends to be a negative when it comes to the precise control that many building simulations require. So, we decided to take a look at how well Feudal Baron: King’s Land played for console gamers.
Plot: The plot is that you inherit a feudal territory and have to rebuild it from scratch as the new baron. The campaign gives you some story framing about reclaiming your birthright and learning to manage the land, but this is not a narrative-heavy title. The story is mostly there to give structure to the town building, resource management, and occasional battles. That is fine for this kind of title, but don’t expect a deep RPG story or anything like that.
Gameplay: Feudal Baron: King’s Land plays like a medieval city management sim, with players placing buildings, managing resources, keeping subjects happy, and trying to grow a functional settlement. There is a campaign along with standalone scenarios and a free-play sandbox mode, so there is more here than just one linear path through the game.
The basic loop is pretty easy to understand. You place homes and production buildings, make sure your people have what they need, and then expand outward as new demands come up. If you enjoy watching a little medieval settlement slowly turn into something more organized and self-sustaining, Feudal Baron can get engrossing for a while.
That said, Feudal Baron never really becomes groundbreaking, which is why I’m scoring the gameplay as 3 GiN Gems out of 5. It’s not terrible at what it does, but there are enough hiccups to make things a little annoying. Tedious might be the better word.
A good example is the influence system. Some buildings let you manually assign the area they affect. For example, a warehouse can support buildings beyond the base area immediately next to it, which is useful because storage and logistics are obviously important in a town builder. However, that is not true for every building. With something like the chapel, not being able to expand or adjust its area in the same way gets frustrating because you end up building multiple chapels as the city grows not necessarily because the first one is full, but because the new houses are outside its influence area.
For the buildings where you can expand their reach, there is also a limit to how far that influence can go. It’s fairly generous, but I would rather be building a new warehouse because the first one is filling up and can’t store anything else, and not because I have run out of influence range. That kind of thing makes the city planning feel a little more artificial than I would like.
There are some survival and management layers too. Players need to keep resources moving, try to prevent unrest, and defend their lands when trouble shows up. That gives the title more structure than just dropping buildings wherever you want, and I can see some city builder fans enjoying the challenge of figuring out efficient layouts.
The battle system, however, is fairly boring. I expected something closer to RTS combat before my first fight, which coincidentally was against a bear. Instead, battles play more like a very barebones turn-based tactical RPG. It works, but it feels underdeveloped compared with the city management side of the game.
And again, Feudal Baron is not super bad or completely boring to play. I just got bummed when I realized that what I was doing near the beginning did not really change all that much as it progressed. The title introduces enough systems to keep things moving for a while, but it does not keep finding new ways to surprise the player.
On the PlayStation 5, the controls were also about what I expected from a city builder moved to consoles. They’re usable and I was able to play without major problems, but this is still the kind of genre that generally feels more natural with a keyboard and mouse. Console players who are used to management titles will probably adjust, but anyone expecting super precise control may need a little patience.
Art: The art is okay, but it is very basic. Honestly, it reminded me a bit of playing Black and White, only with a less memorable presentation and weaker graphics. That title is about 25 years old, so the fact that Feudal Baron made me think of it visually is not great.
I do understand that Feudal Baron comes from a smaller indie studio, and there is some charm to the medieval buildings and settlement layout. The problem is that nothing really stands out all that much. The buildings are readable, the workers do what they need to do, and the world has the expected medieval look, but it is not a title I would point to as visually impressive.
Music: The music was okay in that I didn’t hate it, and it was not super irritating. But it also wasn’t engrossing. Honestly, I listened to it for about half an hour before switching to an audiobook while I played for this review.
That is probably not the worst thing for a slower-paced city builder, since a lot of players may listen to something else while they manage their towns anyway. Still, a stronger soundtrack could have helped give Feudal Baron more personality.
Overall: Feudal Baron: King’s Land is a very average city management title, but being average on console is not the same thing as being useless. There are fewer medieval city builders on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X than there are on PC, so console players who really want this kind of experience may get more out of it than players browsing through the much more crowded Steam library.
Feudal Baron has a workable city building loop, some light survival pressure, a campaign, scenarios, and a sandbox mode. It also has some frustrating design choices, basic visuals, and a battle system that feels undercooked. It does not do much more after the first 30 minutes than it did during the first 30 minutes, but what it does can still be relaxing for the right players.
Feudal Baron: King’s Land is not a bad console city builder. It is just an exceedingly average one.
For those who like: City management, SimCity, medieval aesthetics, and settlement builders.
Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above, basic graphics, and repetitive gameplay.
